Evidence of Epistles to Timothy According to [ Tim. ii, 8], Jesus was “of the seed of David according to my gospel.” This implies that others than Paul did not admit the Davidic ancestry of Jesus, and it is implicitly rejected by Jesus himself in [ Mark xii, 35], as I point out in Myth, Magic, and Morals, ch. xii. That is good proof that the Epistle preserves a tradition that was quite independent on the later Gospels; and that proves that even if the Epistles to Timothy be not Paul’s, they are anyhow very early documents, and constitute another witness to the historicity of Jesus. In the first of them, ch. vi, 13, we learn that Christ Jesus witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate.
Pauline evidence as to death of Jesus, The passages in which Paul insists that Jesus was crucified, died, and rose again are so numerous that they almost defy collection. In [ 1 Cor. xv, 3], Paul relates the story of the resurrection at length. He says he had “received” it from those who believed before himself. From them he had learned that Christ had “died for our sins,” had been “buried,” and “raised on the third day,” after which he appeared first “to Cephas” or Peter, next “to the Twelve”—i.e., the Twelve Apostles of whom we read in the Gospels that Jesus chose them and sent them forth to herald to the Jews the speedy approach of the Kingdom of God. Next “he appeared to 500 brethren at once” of whom most were still alive when Paul wrote; then “to James,” then “to all the apostles,” and “last of all” to Paul himself.
and as to his Hebrew disciples On the strength of this last vision of the Lord, Paul claimed to be as good an apostle as any of those who were apostles before him ([Gal. i, 17]). Accordingly, in [ 1 Cor. ix, 1], he writes in answer to those who pooh-poohed his mission: “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” And again, [ 2 Cor. xi, 22], in the same vein: “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? I speak as one beside myself. I am more; in labours more abundantly, in prisons,” etc.
So [ 2 Cor. xii, 11]: “In nothing came I behind the very chiefest apostles.”
From such passages we can realize what a purely Hebrew business the Church was to begin with. To be an apostle you had to be at least a Hebrew, and it is clear that the earlier apostles challenged the right of Paul to call himself an apostle on the ground that he had not, as they, been a personal follower of Jesus. Their challenge led him to preface his Epistles with an assertion of his apostleship: “Paul, an apostle of Messiah Jesus.”
We learn further ([1 Cor. xi, 23] foll.) how on a certain night “the Lord Jesus was betrayed” or handed over to his enemies (N.B.—The occasion is referred to as one well known); how he then took bread, and when he had given thanks, brake it, etc. All this ill agrees with the view that Paul believed the Jesus of the Gospels to be an ancient Palestinian Sun-God-Saviour Joshua. We read also ([1 Cor. ix, 5]) that “the brethren of the Lord,” like “the rest of the apostles and Cephas,” led about wives (probably spiritual ones), and Paul claims the same right for himself. In Galatians, ch. ii, he recounts how he went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and tarried with him fifteen days, on which occasion he associated with James, the brother of the solar myth. On another occasion this brother of the Sun-god sent emissaries to Antioch to warn Peter or Cephas against eating with Gentiles, as Paul had taught him to do. Peter had been “intrusted with the gospel of the circumcision,” as Paul with that of the uncircumcision. On this occasion there was a stand-up quarrel between Paul and the older apostle of the sun-myth, and Paul’s Epistles ring from beginning to end with echoes of his quarrel over circumcision with the sun-myth’s earlier followers.
How do Mr. Robertson and his friends get round all this evidence? Their way out of it is beautifully simple. It consists in ruling out every passage as an interpolation that stands in their way. So I have seen an ill-tempered chess-player, when he lost his queen, kick over the chess-table and begin to swear. That is one device. The other is to pretend that the apostles with whom Paul was in personal touch were not apostles of the solar god, but of the Jewish high priest, who was also president of that secret society in whose bosom were acted the ritual and dramas or mystery-plays[2] of annually slain Joshuas, of vegetation-gods, of Osiris, Krishna, and the whole pack of mythical beings out of whom the Jewish Messiah Jesus was compacted.
The “myth” of the Twelve Let us take first the “myth,” as Mr. Robertson styles it, of the Twelve Apostles. Needless to say, Mr. Robertson and his friends regard the Gospel story of their choice and mission as a fable. But they have the bad grace to turn up afresh in Paul’s Epistles. Away with them, therefore, exclaims Mr. Robertson; and his friends echo his cry.
“In the documents from which all scientific study of Christian origins must proceed—the Epistles of Paul—there is no evidence of such a body” (Christianity and Mythology, p. 341).
In the passage in which the Twelve are mentioned ([1 Cor. xv, 3] foll.) we are further instructed “there is one interpolation on another.” It does not in the least matter that the passage stands in every manuscript, and in every ancient version and commentator. It offends Mr. Robertson and his friends; so we must cut it out. Bos locutus est; and he complacently sums up his argument (p. 342) in the words: “Paul, then, knew nothing of a ‘twelve.’ ”